When interior designer Yancey Martin and her husband moved from Los Angeles to Chattanooga three years ago, Martin had no local friends. Ever the extrovert, she decided to remedy the situation by hosting dinner parties.
“We feel like there’s no better way to meet people than to have them in your home, sitting around a table,” she smiles.
As Martin was preparing for these gatherings, she found herself driving to different sections of Chattanooga to find shops that sold items she felt were exceptional enough to display in her home.
“I’m a maximalist. I love colors, textures and patterns, and I’m a big believer in quality, so I’d rather have one great piece than 20 so-so pieces. When I invest in something, I make sure it’s really well done. I have drapery that’s 20 years old in my house.”
Although Martin enjoys hosting dinner parties, she dislikes cooking, she says, so finding markets that sell food that would meet her guests’ expectations (football nachos would not be on her menu) was also paramount.
Even after Martin found merchants who met her high standards, she still had to hoof it to multiple locations when prepping for an occasion. Martin could have purchased all the home décor she wanted at a big box store, but the interior designer in her demanded the best, and she could have acquired adequately tasty heat-and-serve dishes at a local supermarket, but the foodie in her insisted on better.
An idea came to Martin as she was scouring a local market for food: Chattanooga needed a shop that contained everything a host required for a memorable dinner party under a single roof. From the candles and dinner plates to the quiche and chocolate cake, she’d open a one-stop shop for local party hosts.
Martin launched her brainchild – Mosaic Home + Market – in Chattanooga’s North Shore community in November. Her motto is “Creating a life well lived at home.”
To emphasize the two most important facets of hosting a dinner party, Martin has separated her meticulously curated product lines into two categories, each of which occupies one floor of her two-story building at 516 Cherokee Boulevard.
Martin has dubbed the top floor, which includes the only entrance that faces Cherokee, “Mosaic Home.” It contains all of the accoutrement a host needs to turn their home into a fabulous setting for a party, Martin says.
Martin’s design sensibilities are on full display in the roomy and beautifully conceived space. Each miniature scene showcases a single product, whether it’s sweet-smelling candles, eye-catching splatterware (dinnerware hand-dipped in white enamel and flicked with a saturated color), hand-woven placemats, hand-stitched pillows, elegant napkins rings and more, all of which can be preceded by one superlative or another.
Martin proudly says everything is artisan-made. “We’ve imported items from Europe, Central and South America, Africa and elsewhere,” she boasts, pointing to a collection of colorful resin serveware from the Philippines.
Other standouts are the stick candles, which are fashioned from beeswax and live up to their name by looking like actual sticks. “A company in Currie, North Carolina, makes those,” Martin notes. “They forage tree cuttings and use them to create molds so that each candle is unique. We have oak, cedar and maple candles. It’s a cool way to elevate the everyday candle experience.”
Martin is going against the high-tech grain with handmade photo albums she hopes will encourage guests to sit closer together and interact. “Everyone is doing the Amazon photo album these days, but you can fill these with pictures and place them on your coffee table to foster conversation.”
Mosaic Home + Market has also invested heavily in ceramics. Dazzling hand-painted platterware from Puglia, Italy, Athens, Greece, and Portugal occupy the shelf closest to the cash register, which is in the rear of the boutique. One would be wise to step carefully as they browse the display, as a single plate costs $100, while one dessert plate is priced at $50.
“We’ve also worked with some incredible local artists,” Martin says as she walks toward a shelf containing an array of gleaming drinking glasses. The surface of each item is covered with shiny knobs of melted glass, giving them a unique texture. Martin collaborated with Christopher Mosey at Igniss Glass Studio in Chattanooga to make them.
If a customer has money left over for food to place on their $100 plates – or if they’ve sufficiently trimmed their guest list to keep their budget in check – they can descend a set of stairs that passes behind the cash register and find “Mosaic Market” in the lower section of the shop.
This is where the food is. Like everything upstairs, Martin carefully curated her selection of heat-and-serve offerings, baked goods, frozen delights and more. By “carefully curated,” she means “taste tested.”
“My husband and I have spent the last year putting in the work,” she laughs.
And what a wonderwork the market is. There’s pasta made by an Italian family in New Jersey, pizza from Brooklyn, New York, wagyu beef from Chili Pepper Ranch in Apison and Alaskan-caught seafood from Marithyme Seafood Company in Chattanooga.
Hosts planning a breakfast or brunch gathering will likely be pleased that biscuits, quiches and banana bread are on hand, while Mosaic’s desserts include from-scratch pies, cakes and cookies, tiny ice cream sandwiches and other fare.
“A great party needs great food,” Martin explains. “Although I’m not a chef, I value quality, and I want everything I serve to taste homemade, so we searched high and low to find these things.”
Martin has designed the market to encourage mixing and matching. For example, one can pair the chicken salad she imports from Atlanta with her ranch-flavored saltines, which are displayed nearby.
As of Dec. 5, Mosaic Home + Market is missing one key party ingredient: wine. Martin has already cleared a corner of her market for her selection and says it will debut as soon as she secures the necessary license.
Until then, Martin says, Mosaic Home + Market has every other conceivable item a host needs to pull off a memorable occasion. “We want to encourage people to host again,” she says. “So, come see what we have, and let’s work together on your next event.”